Professors Adriana San Miguel and Qingshan Wei Selected as Goodnight Early Career Innovators

Professors Adriana San Miguel and Qingshan Wei have been selected as 2022-23 Goodnight Early Career Innovators.

The Goodnight Early Career Innovator Award program “recognizes and rewards tenure-track assistant professors who demonstrate early productivity in STEM or STEM education research and innovation.”  The Award selection criteria specify that, “… A strong nominee will have demonstrated superior scholarly achievement at an early career stage and will have a rigorous research agenda that speaks to the candidate’s potential to advance knowledge in STEM or STEM education…”

 

Prof. San Miguel is a Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program cluster hire in Synthetic and Systems Biology. Her research focuses on developing experimental platforms that enable high-throughput automated extraction of biological data, mainly from images of subcellular anatomical features in live organisms. The main areas of focus are Aging and Lifespan, Neurodegeneration and neuronal remodeling and Stress response.

The San Miguel Lab, “is dedicated to accelerating biological discoveries by combining engineering and systems approaches to answer elusive questions in different areas of biology. We use customized tools, such as microfluidics and computer vision, that enable performing imaging-based experiments in a high-throughput, high-content manner. We are interested in addressing fundamental questions regarding aging, stress, and neurodegeneration using the model organism C. elegans (roundworms). We have expertise on high-content quantitative characterization of phenotypes (i.e., deep phenotyping) at various scales: from the subcellular level all the way to whole-organism behavioral outputs.”

A video portrait of Prof. San Miguel discussing her research is available here.

Prof. San Miguel received her B.S. in chemical engineering from the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. After a brief stint in industry, Prof. San Miguel enrolled at Georgia Tech, where she earned her Ph.D. in chemical engineering. Before she joined the CBE faculty as an assistant professor she completed postdoctoral fellowships at Georgia Tech and at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute & Harvard Medical School.

Prof. Wei is a member of the NC State Emerging Plant Disease and Global Food Security Cluster. His research is focused on developing next-generation field-deployable molecular imaging, sensing, and diagnostic tools for plants and humans. The overarching goal of the work is to develop novel point-of-care (POC) diagnostic tools for automated “sample-to-answer” analysis in real time.

The technologies Prof. Wei’s research group develops include mobile phone-based imaging and sensing devices, molecular assays on a chip, nanoplasmonics-enhanced molecular detection devices and volatile organic compounds (VOC) sensors. The areas where the tools can be utilized include mobile health, emerging plant diseases, and food security and environmental sensing.

A video portrait of Prof. Wei discussing his research is available here.

Prof. Wei received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in polymer materials and engineering from Zhejiang University, and his Ph.D. in chemistry from Purdue University. Afterwards, he conducted postdoctoral training in the Bioengineering and Electrical Engineering Departments at UCLA. His awards include the Nano Research Young Innovators Award in Nanobiotechnology a National Science Foundation CAREER Award and he was honored in the 2022 “Futures” Issue of the AIChE Journal.

Congratulations to Professors Adriana San Miguel and Qingshan Wei for this honor and recognition of your professional accomplishments!